


an ocean so deep he will drown in his sleep

by Mici (noharlembeat)



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Compliant, LINEAR FIC, M/M, Memories, happyish ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-29
Updated: 2015-01-29
Packaged: 2018-03-09 13:11:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3250913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noharlembeat/pseuds/Mici
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“What do you think would have happened, if we hadn’t met?” Steve asked, once.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	an ocean so deep he will drown in his sleep

**Author's Note:**

  * For [augustbird](https://archiveofourown.org/users/augustbird/gifts).



> ahahahaha oh my god this is unbetaed and weird please forgive me. For Jenny who enabled it out of me! I'm so sorry. Title is from the song by Oren Lavie "A Dream Within a Dream" and if you haven't heard it don't read this fic just go listen to the entire album.

“What do you think would have happened, if we hadn’t met?” Steve asked, once. Bucky was sixteen, and getting used to his long legs, blowing by Steve every minute. It was the kind of question that Steve asked when he was getting moody, and frankly, Bucky found it more than just a little annoying. 

So he did what he always did when Steve got moody and asked dumb questions – he rolled his eyes and pushed him along to whatever thing they were occupying their time with that day. That day was the kind of cold day that only New York could wrangle up, the kind of cold day where Bucky could feel the cold seeping up through the soles of his boots from the ground. “Are you asking because you want me to leave you in the cold?”

Steve gave him a sad, hangdog look back, as Bucky pressed him inside and into the hall of his tenement. “Well, I mean, my ma is sick and you’re basically what’s-“

“If you say another word, Steve, I swear to God-“

“Don’t swear-“

“-I will leave you in Prospect Park for the wolves.” Bucky finished, and muscled him into the apartment. His own mother was making something in the oven, because it heated the entire place up, all snug. 

Steve just gave him a _look_ , like maybe Bucky was slowly growing a pair of horns out his forehead. “I don’t think there have been wolves in Prospect Park since before the Dutch.”

“Have you seen the packs of kids that patrol that place? _Wolves_ ,” Bucky insisted, and that’s when he sat Steve down at the table and tossed him a hard-boiled egg, still warm from where it was nestled in a pile of other hard-boiled eggs in a kitchen towel. 

Steve, without surprising anyone, dropped it, and they both stared down at the mess on the floor for a good solid minute before Bucky started laughing, and the entire topic of _who met what how_ was forgotten.

~~~~

The next time that it came up was almost ten years later, and it wasn’t Steve who brought it up. There was a special kind of patience in being a sniper, and mostly it was the ability to entertain oneself while lying flat, cold, hungry, and more probably than not, wet, for hours at a time. It was the proof against boredom, and Bucky had it, somehow. 

Steve had no such thing, which is why Steve had trouble with algebra in theory, and with reading Nathaniel Hawthorne. 

But more than anything, what Bucky had was an unswerving eye for people about to make trouble for his best friend. Pressed to answer questions about it, Bucky would drawl out something about how it was just luck, but it wasn’t, really. It was a carefully honed skill, something that took years of practice. He could spot someone coming for Steve from miles away, like they gave off some kind of scent that only Bucky could pick up. The foul odor of _here’s a real bag of cats_ , like some kind of god-forsaken perfume. 

Which is why Bucky was the perfect person to stay quiet while he picked off Nazis from a distance, one by one. 

But that meant keeping himself from losing his mind, and that meant considering dumb questions, divergences in their lives. What the hell would have happened if Steve hadn’t defied orders back in Italy (Bucky’d be dead) or what if he’s shipped back to America like maybe some dirty, mutinous part of him considered (what the hell is wrong with your head, Barnes?)?

And then, like gears working back, his brain suggested, _what if you hadn’t met him when you were five_?

His heart constricted in his chest, for all that his trigger finger still worked well enough to snap a bullet in between the eyes of the guy lifting his gun at Steve. 

Later, in Steve’s tent, his cold feet against Steve’s calves in a way that was more friendly-like than probably most guys would admit to when cozying up to their best friends (did any other pair of men act the way they did, like there were no physical boundaries except the ones between their genitals and the ones between their mouths? Christ, it was a joke, wasn’t it?) and Steve pushing a bit at him to _get off_ but without any real ambition to it, he said it. “Hey, what would have happened if we hadn’t met?”

“I’d be dead,” Steve said back, casually, wrestling Bucky into a position that was more comfortable for the both of them. “Probably at age twelve after running my mouth off in some alley.”

Bucky didn’t like the sound of that, didn’t like the certainty of it, or the way that his head just pointed out that yeah, that was probably true. It wasn’t often that his head and his heart were in disagreements, but when it came to the subject of _Steve Rogers expiring in some logical fashion_ , apparently it was nothing short of war. “You’da found someone else to watch your back,” Bucky argued, but then his heart wasn’t so sure of that, either. God, he had to get this under control. There had to be medicine for this kind of pain, it was 1944.

Steve looked at him, funny-like, some kind of argument on his face. “I don’t think so,” he argued, but then he turned, pressed his face against Bucky’s shoulder. His nose was a block of ice and Bucky yelped about it, and he forgot it while he tried to get Steve’s face away from him. This was a lot easier when he weighed as much as a carton of apples, instead of roughly the same as a bar of steel.  
~~~~~

He thought his whole life was supposed to flash before his eyes, wasn’t that what they said, he thought, but all he felt really was the fear bubbling in his stomach and winding up his spine, into his mouth. He was going to die, but worse, there was Steve, being an _idiot_ , and Bucky wasn’t telling him no, because he was a selfish bastard, because he didn’t want to die, he wanted to go home and kiss his ma and he wanted Steve to grab his arm and then he would tell him, God, he swore, he _swore_ , he would tell him everything even if Steve punched him with his muscley arm and never spoke to him again, he’d tell him how his life would have been worse without him, that he would have been a worse person, that he _loved_ him like he was supposed to love some girl, like how Steve loved Peggy, he would tell him if he could just _live_ , God, the terror was the worst, _God_ -

~~~~~

Waking up wasn’t like coming up from a dream. It was like sucking in oxygen, like drowning and getting a hit of it, just as he was getting pulled back under. It hurt every time, but not just his lungs, his whole head and his back and his insides, twisting and snarling and howling pain, because it wasn’t like there were two people sitting in Bucky’s head, no, it wasn’t anything so _benign_.

It was one person, one person waking up and Bucky couldn’t do it, could he? 

It was a memory, tainted and poisonous but sweet and luring all the same, the memory of Steve, tiny, gasping for air, and Bucky was ashamed that he could equate it. But he remembered, too, his hands on Steve’s back, rubbing circles there as Steve tried to fight him off. Steve hated it when people touched him like that, when they thought he was weak, even though Bucky never thought that. It wasn’t a character flaw, it was like Steve’s body had to make up for how big his damned heart was, to fit all of Bucky inside of it and still have room for defending every stray and sad face in Brooklyn.

He didn’t know how that memory came back so fast, but it gave him more than just this strange sense of _being_ , it started the formation of an idea, which was why Bucky was curled up like a cat on Steve’s fire escape, too scared he was wrong to go in, too scared that those memories were nothing but traps set to lure him back to someone who would kill him.

It didn’t matter that Steve hadn’t killed him on the bridge, what if this was all some colossal mistake, what if those memories weren’t real? 

Here was the thing about drowning: Bucky realized he was mistaking the water for air.

But even Steve had to notice, and he noticed, sooner, rather than later. But he didn’t force Bucky in, or say anything. He left food on the fire escape, which Bucky fed to the cats, first, because if it was poisoned they would die. That’s what he thought (another memory, water or air, he wasn’t sure, about _feeding the strays_ and _the orange one with the missing ear was his favorite_ ) but they didn’t, die, anyway, and Bucky ate the food and slept in the military blanket and listened when Steve talked out into the fire escape but never really _to_ him, more _at_ him. It was better that way.

Two weeks passed, and the nights were getting chilly, when Steve came home and left a plate of something spicy and said, “What if we hadn’t met as kids?”

Something stirred in Bucky, then, old wounds opened, hurting and vile but he couldn’t stop, he couldn’t stop himself from trying to suck in air where there was only water. This wasn’t a good question. This was a bad current, it was dragging him along to somewhere-

“I think I would have died. I mean it. You wouldn’t have been there when Phil Brickle was beating the stuffing out of me in 1928, and he would have killed me. Or back in 1934? When there was that cold spell? My mother had already passed, and you made me stay at your place and you kept me warm all night, you kept me breathing. You whispered every breath in my ear.” His voice hitched a bit, just a tiny gap of breath. It made Bucky want to protest, to fight against whatever was causing it, but there was nothing to fight, not the way he had the resources for now, anyway. He couldn’t fight the past anymore. He wasn’t strong enough. 

And Steve continued, relentless, like a storm. “So I’d be dead. All right. I never thought I’d make it past thirty, anyway, and it’s not looking good if I keep finding trouble,” he said, and Bucky wanted to, to what, to beat sense into him, to yell at him until he was careful and safe because he was precious, “but _you_ , you.”

He stopped them, for a minute, and Bucky finally got to looking over the edge of the window, to look Steve in the eye. Steve was looking back at him, just like that, and a gasp for water, _water_. “You would have lived, right? I mean, if I hadn’t been there to poke and prod at you, you would have, I don’t know. You wouldn’t have been such a good shot if you hadn’t had to watch my back, they wouldn’t have put you in special training, you would have come back and lived your life and had a bunch of kids, and.”

And just like that, _air_. “I wouldn’t have been a good person without you,” Bucky managed, his voice hoarse and low, lower than it was supposed to be. “I would have been a real jerk. I’da been angry and lost and lonely, and I’da never found anyone I was supposed to love the way I loved you.” 

“You would have lived,” Steve argued.

“There’s living and there’s living,” Bucky replied, suddenly, like it was _easy_ , breathing air, waking up, _not drowning._ “I would have been someone you wouldn’t want to meet. Someone worse off for not knowing you.”

There was silence between them, for a long minute, and it kept going, until Bucky finally broke it. “And you would-“

“Be dead.”

“Been angrier,” Bucky said, but he pushed himself up. He could feel the ocean under him, looming, waiting, waiting for him to slip and come back under. It scared him more than he really could say. It scared him more than the fall, the urgent prayers to God, the last moments of Steve’s face against sky and train. 

Steve watched him, then, but finally nodded. “Been angrier,” he agreed, “been impatient. Been worse off.”

“I’m not right in the head,” Bucky said.

“I’m not right in the heart,” Steve replied, but he was rolling his eyes, almost. “You coming in? It’s dropping below freezing tonight.”

“Is my ma baking?” Bucky asked, and Steve’s smile turned a bit brittle, but Bucky shook his head. “No, sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean it, I mean, it was a joke, like-“

“Come on, your feet’ll freeze off,” Steve replied, pulling him inside by the metal hand, and Bucky let him, and breathed, air, air, air.


End file.
